Make It Make Sense! Understanding and Facilitating Sensemaking in Computational Notebooks

TL;DR

This paper introduces Porpoise, an interactive tool that improves understanding of complex computational notebooks by organizing and annotating content, thereby facilitating sensemaking for data scientists.

Contribution

It presents a novel interactive overlay, Porpoise, that enhances notebook comprehension through structured grouping and annotations, based on a new sensemaking task catalog.

Findings

Porpoise improved code comprehension for data scientists.

Participants described Porpoise as making notebooks feel more like reading a book.

The tool was effective in aiding understanding of complex, exploratory notebooks.

Abstract

Reusing and making sense of other scientists' computational notebooks. However, making sense of existing notebooks is a struggle, as these reference notebooks are often exploratory, have messy structures, include multiple alternatives, and have little explanation. To help mitigate these issues, we developed a catalog of cognitive tasks associated with the sensemaking process. Utilizing this catalog, we introduce Porpoise: an interactive overlay on computational notebooks. Porpoise integrates computational notebook features with digital design, grouping cells into labeled sections that can be expanded, collapsed, or annotated for improved sensemaking. We investigated data scientists' needs with unfamiliar computational notebooks and investigated the impact of Porpoise adaptations on their comprehension process. Our counterbalanced study with 24 data scientists found Porpoise enhanced code comprehension, making the experience more akin to reading a book, with one participant describing it as It's really like reading a book.